How I plan out my future posts

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Blogging daily is tough. I just passed six months and I’m going strong, but it’ll end at some point. For now, though, here is how I make it happen.

Lots of ideas

The biggest challenge for me is coming up with ideas. Following the idea of “long periods of thinking, short periods of writing“, actually creating each post only takes me around 15-20 minutes — it’s the work to get to that point that takes more time.

I have two older posts that talk about finding ideas, and these are still my best sources:

Whatever you do, though, be sure to capture every idea you have. I put mine under a #blogideas tag in Roam Research, but you can store yours anywhere. They key is to get them out of your head and saved somewhere so you don’t forget about them.

I’ll take those short #blogideas in Roam and add other small notes or links as they come up, but most of the work happens directly in the WordPress editor as I start building out the post.

Batches of time

The key to my recent streak is really the concept of batching. I write a handful of posts in one sitting, and then drip them out over the subsequent days.

This is partially only possible because of the types of posts that I write. If I was covering breaking tech news or something, I couldn’t hold posts for days at a time. By mostly writing more evergreen content, it allows me to stack some up. I generally like to have 6-8 in the tank ready to go, but as of this writing I only have two in there so it’s time to catch up!

In terms of specific timing for writing, I have two main windows for this:

  • Weekday evenings. After I drop my daughter off at dance and dinner dishes have been put up, I have about 90 minutes to myself. This is a big time for reading and writing. Ideas come all during the day, but it’s generally this time when I’ll pull them back out and start working through them.
  • Weekend afternoons. This varies a lot more, based on yard work, family trips, etc, but I often find a few open hours in the afternoons on weekends and can put a bit of time in there.

Every day?

I’ve mentioned before that I kind of cheat at the “blogging every day”, because while I publish every day I don’t technically write every day. That may change with time, but right now it’d be very difficult to do. Kudos to those that can make it work.

I’ll leave you with a link to see Marc’s writing process, which inspired me to create this post. While I don’t follow the same format as him, we have a few similarities and perhaps something in his writing will inspire you.

If you publish frequently, what does your process look like?

Full site editing is coming to WordPress

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Ever since WordPress unveiled the drag-and-drop “Gutenberg” editor a few years ago, which I use on here (and my first post with it was three years ago today), there has been talk of when it might be extended to help edit your entire site. That time is coming very soon.

As of today, you can use the Gutenberg editor in your post. All of this content I’m writing is using Gutenberg, but I can’t use it to edit the navigation menu, sidebar items, or the footer.

While it won’t be a full site-wide editing tool immediately, the first pieces of it should come along with WordPress 5.8 this July.

If you want to learn more, this summary from Justin Tadlock is excellent and should answer many of your questions. The next few releases of WordPress will really be some major milestones, so they’re good ones to keep a close eye on.

Some first steps with Google Search Console

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You may be familiar with Google Analytics, used to track traffic on a website, but not as many are as familiar with Google Search Console. I thought I’d take a minute to explain why you might want to set it up.

The great thing about Google Search Console is that there is nothing you need to really “set up”. No code to install or anything like that. It’s 100% run from Google’s servers — you just need to prove that your site is really yours, and then you get access to the data within.

Google Analytics vs Google Search Console

When first starting out, people are often confused about the difference between Google Analytics and Google Search Console, as they seem fairly similar — and they are. The best analogy I have is this one:

Google Analytics is on your site. It’s like someone being in your house, writing down everything that’s going on. Who is coming over, who is leaving, what they look like, what they did while they were there. Things like that.

Google Search Console is more like someone in a car in front of your house. They can see who is coming and going, but can’t tell what’s really happening inside.

The great thing with Search Console is that Google can tell you a ton about what’s happening with your site on Google. Analytics only tells you what happens when someone arrives on your site (which is hugely valuable, of course), but Search Console can tell you more about what happened before they arrived.

In fact, it can help answer some of the questions I raised in my recent post about Survivorship Bias — what are some things that people are searching for in Google when your site doesn’t get clicked? That is amazing information to know.

Like Google Analytics, there are hundreds of things to see in Google Search Console, and it can be a bit overwhelming. To get started, here are three areas that I like to look at in Search Console.

Search Results

If you click “Search Results” on the left side of the page you can dig into how your site shows up in Google searches. Among other things, this page will show you how many “clicks” and “impressions” you’ve been involved with recently.

Clicks are showing how many times you’ve appeared in search for a given query, and then the user has clicked through to your site.

Impressions are how many times you’ve appeared in search for a given query, regardless whether anyone clicked your result or not.

The intersection of those is pretty neat — you can see times when you show up a lot for a given search term but have zero clicks. This is likely a great opportunity to work on that keyword and start getting some clicks. It’s way easier to raise up a keyword like that than to try to rank for a brand new one.

Here is a screenshot of this blog in Search Console, showing a bunch of great opportunities for me.

Sitemaps

The next area to visit is the “sitemaps” tab on the left side of Search Console. This is where you can link to a sitemap on your site, which is a special page that lists all of your pages and posts. It’s not much to look at, but can be pretty useful. For example, if you want to check out the sitemap for this site, you can see it here:

https://www.mickmel.com/sitemaps.xml

This is powerful with Search Console, though, because it’s a quick way to tell Google what all of your pages are. They won’t necessarily rank you any better because of it, but helping Google to understand your website is always a good idea.

To find your sitemap, most SEO plugins on WordPress include one, if not then WordPress itself has one you can use. If you’re not on WordPress, check with your software to see how they handle it.

The other great thing about sitemaps is that they update automatically. Load it into Search Console once and it’ll automatically pick up every new page and post that you create in the future.

Messages from Google

This is perhaps the least used, but most important. If Google sees a problem with your site, they’ll use Search Console to contact you. If you don’t have Search Console set up, you’re out of luck.

They may reach out because some of your pages disappeared, or they think you’ve been hacked, or a variety of other things. It’s almost always bad news, but it’s news you need to be aware of so you can fix it.

We set up Search Console for every client site that we manage, with the main job of listening for these messages so we can fix any issues that might pop up.

How to get started

If you’re not yet set up in Search Console, it’s pretty easy to get started. Just head over here:

https://search.google.com/search-console/welcome

Enter the address for your site, and then it’ll ask for confirmation. That may take a bit of work, but your web developer can help with that.

Or, if someone else already has access to Search Console for your site they can click on “Settings” and then “Users and permissions” and add you that way.

If you have trouble getting verified, or have any other questions about how to use Search Console, leave a comment below and we can help you out.

If you want to improve, keep the comments open

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One of the big questions new bloggers face is whether or not to allow readers to leave comments. In almost every case, I think the answer is a solid yes. Here’s a bit about why:

Take back your content

As I shared late last year, I think more people need to be blogging in order to take back their content. If you want your blog to be the hub of your content, it only makes sense to allow people to talk to you about it there.

Comments are rare

Related, though, comments are pretty rare on most sites. Using this blog as an example, at the time of this writing I have 707 posts and 853 comments — that’s barely more than one per post.

You may get into a situation where dealing with a ton of comments is an issue, and I hope we get back into that world with a lot of blogs, but it’s unlikely to happen.

Related, though, make sure you have some kind of anti-spam system in place. Human comments are fairly rare, but spammers continue to go nuts. I still use Akismet (which I first talked about 13 years ago) and it does a great job.

Who is it for?

The main question is asking who the content is for. If you’re writing about the latest video games or politics, I could see turning the comments off. Personally I like to see them on posts like that, but they often turn into arguments about silly things and can be more trouble than they’re worth.

This blog, for the most part, is a way for me to unpack my own thoughts. If someone reads a post of mine and has another angle to consider, I absolutely want to hear about it.

As Anne Roche recently mentioned to me, gaining more insight into your own writing is awesome, and I think comments can be a great way to see that.

As part of taking the altMBA, there are two pieces that really apply here:

  1. Leaving good comments can be a bit of an art, and receiving them can be as well.
  2. More importantly, the “revision script” that we wrote for each post, based on the comments we received, was one of the best parts of the altMBA process.

How that translates into a blog post could go a few different ways. Maybe you edit your old posts with your new insights? Maybe write an new update about an old post later? Either way, the insights that you gain from great comments can be an amazing thing, and you can’t get that if you don’t have comments.

“I keep them turned off”

I know folks that intentionally disable comments on their blog, and some have very good reasons for doing so. Keeping them turned on isn’t for everyone. However, for the sake of those of us that like to dig a little deeper in conversations, consider keeping them open on your site and leaving comments of your own a bit more often on other sites.

Website Accessibility: Help your users, help your rankings

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Yesterday at the A Brighter Web Meetup, we had a great discussion about website accessibility, why it’s important, and steps to take to get started.

You can download the slides as a PDF, or view them all here:

You can also check out this post for some tips to get you started on making your site work better for everyone.

If you need further help with website accessibility, don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll be happy to assist.

300 posts gone

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I’ve been doing quite a lot of clean-up, organization, and optimization on this blog, and a few days ago I deleted 297 old posts! I still have hundreds on here, going back to early 2004.

Why delete?

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The posts I deleted were quite useless at this point, to be honest. My recent posts I’ve tried to make a bit more timeless, but the old posts I deleted were in two main groups:

  • Google Earth imagery updates. There’s essentially no value today in knowing that Chicago got fresh imagery in Google Earth 12 years ago.
  • WordPress updates. Those were a bit more interesting, but still of little value to see those from years ago.

New categories

While going through and cleaning up the posts, I added a few new categories to help organize things. I got rid of the “general” bucket, at least for now, and added these:

  • Accessibility: Related to website accessibility thoughts and issues for impaired users.
  • Coaching: I’m not sure this is the right name for it, but it’s essentially my “go do it today!” kinds of posts.
  • Entertainment: I talk about games and toys a bit, and they go in here now.
  • Health: A fairly weak category for now, but growing.
  • Learning: Kind of a meta category, my thoughts on learning about learning.
  • Sonder: A category for posts about sonder, empathy, bias, arguments, and things like that.
  • Trust: Thoughts about ways to gain trust, and examples of how companies have lost trust.

You can always see the full list of categories on the right side of the site.

I don’t expect many people browse using the categories, but they’ll help me frame my thoughts a bit better. Plus, if you do ever browse by category you should find them to be a bit more valuable.

Speeding up this blog

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Over the past day, I’ve done a few things to speed up the load time of this site. It wasn’t particularly slow to begin with, but these changes should help make it a bit snappier.

Here’s a before and after of the speed scores for the site:

Hosting

The biggest change I made was with hosting. The site had been hosted on an older server that we have, it was fine, but I’ve moved it over to Flywheel and the results speak for themselves. At GreenMellen we currently manage 138 sites hosted by them, and we love the speed and service that we get. That’s not to say Flywheel is your only good option, but they’re one of a half-dozen hosting companies that I think are pretty solid and we tend to like them.

HTTP/2

While Flywheel is a great all-around host, a specific part of my reason for moving the site to them is that they support HTTP/2 (like most hosts these days), but my old host didn’t. Thanks to Bobby Kircher and Tom Fanelli for their insights on how this piece works.

The main difference from HTTP/1.1 to HTTP/2 are how it bundles files together for the end user. When you load a web page, any web page, the site is actually sending you a bunch of different files to reassemble on your end. For example, the home page of this blog is 43 separate files, and most sites are in the 50-100 kind of range. With HTTP/1.1, those files were all sent individually; with HTTP/2, they’re bundled and sent. Given our fast internet connections these days it won’t make a huge difference, but it can certainly help.

If that all sounds like technical noise to your ears, just know this — a good hosting company will help in more ways that you might expect.

Website speed is good for users and good for your rankings, so it’s always a great idea to be fine-tuning how things run.

Thinking through “A Brighter Web”

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We’ve been running various aspect of A Brighter Web, an educational arm of our agency, for quite a while now. We’ve hosted our Meetup every month (sometimes more) for about nine years now, we have a reasonably active Facebook group, and we’ve played with podcasting and other media.

So what’s next?

To be honest, I’m not sure. We’ll likely be streamlining the website in the coming months — hosting less content on there, and pushing more to the outlets that we use (like Meetup and Facebook).

We’ve had a Slack team going for a while, but we’ve not really invested in it and it’s essentially dead. That’s likely for the best.

We may be firing up the podcast again in the next few months, but we’re still undecided on that.

I’ve been playing with the new TogetherLetters app for the past few months with some small groups, and I’ll likely open it up to the main users of A Brighter Web once they start allowing larger groups to join. If you’ve not seen it yet, it’s a neat concept. Check out the “see how it works” video on their home page.

We have a lot of options in front of us, and it’s fun to start plotting out a path for the future. If nothing else, we’ll keep hosting the monthly Meetups for the foreseeable future, so come check them out and join us!

Thomas Edison was bad at math

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Thomas Edison was famously bad at math (he said he had a “distaste” for it), but math was essential to much of the work he did. Rather than force himself to learn it better, he focused where he excelled, and hired mathematicians to assist with his work.

Who built your mouse?

Related, Matt Ridley has a great riff on how there isn’t a single person on earth that can build a computer mouse. Between the plastic, metal, silicon, software, etc, it takes a lot of people to make a relatively simple device. Here’s a quick video of him explaining it:

Websites

You can take it further with websites. I understand WordPress quite well, but I don’t know every bit of it — not even close.

It relies on technologies like PHP and MySQL that I know even less about. A typical website is often running with Apache software on a Linux server, which is essentially where I tap out.

Of course, the hardware of the server itself is a wildly complex beast, at least a few orders of magnitude more complicated than that mouse. Then you have power running to the server, and then that little bit about the entire internet helping to get the bits from the server to you.

Lastly, that doesn’t even touch on everything needed for my computer to function to pull up a website and get editing. Even just pressing a single key on a keyboard creates a tremendous amount of complexity.

But that’s the cool thing — I don’t need to understand every step along the way. I’m interested in it, and learn pieces as I go, but it’d be literally impossible for one person to put it all together.

I’ve been using WordPress for nearly 17 years at this point, but that would all be for naught if I didn’t have a great team to help with design and other website necessities, and then the flurry of technologies (starting with web hosting) below us to make it all happen.

I’m thankful for companies like Flywheel that provide great hosting, and they’re thankful for companies like us that send more websites in their direction. We don’t need to work to become the other company — we can excel in our own lanes.

Having a wide breadth of knowledge is a good thing, and is a big part of reason this blog exists — I always want to be learning. At the end of the day, though, what matters is what you are great at doing so others know who they can turn to when they have a problem that you can solve.

Social media is vapor

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If you’re reading this post in 2021, there is a good chance you found this post via social media. If you’re reading this at some point later, you probably didn’t — at least not from a social post of mine. My posts about it have come and gone, just like millions of other posts every day.

I wrote my first post on this blog nearly 17 years ago, and moved to WordPress on May 24, 2004. There’s no reason to think it won’t exist for at least 20 years more. There are no guarantees, of course, but it seems feasible.

Social media posts, as you know, have a very short life span. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but something you always need to consider. When I first started this blog, Friendster, XING and Myspace were the top social channels. Any content I had published on any of them is long gone by now.

What will the landscape look like 20 years from now? It’s hard to know. Even so, while sites like Facebook and Twitter keep most of your posts forever, finding old posts can be very difficult. Even if they still exist, your older content will be difficult to find.

Still, be social

Social media can be great. While this blog has comments, interactions are fairly rare, and are served much better on a social media platform. If you want to share ideas or news with your friends, social media is excellent.

The problem, as I’ve expressed before, is that social media posts come and go. If you have something worthwhile to say, publish it on your own blog and share that post with the world. This is likely one reason why Seth Godin doesn’t tweet — rather than share quick insights that come and go, he turns his quick thoughts into deeper insights that can stand the test of time.

Beyond that, it’s fairly difficult to back up your social media posts in a way that can be republished. With a blog, you can create a quick, full backup of everything, and move it elsewhere. This blog has been on a number of hosts over the years, but moved without a change in address or even a tiny hiccup. That alone is powerful.

The river

Enjoy social media, but don’t let your insights drift away. Social media is often compared to a river; take a dip when you can, but the content will keep sailing away whether you’re there or not. Those dips are fun, and I’ll continue to pop in frequently, but take the time to set up your own platform that will exist far longer than your social media platform of choice will.